Twist of Fate
by Ultrawoman
Summary: What if Neal didn't listen to August? What if he stayed with Emma and neither got caught by the cops? What if when her 28th birthday came around, he was the one who had to tell her all about her destiny as the saviour?


**A/N: I originally wrote this years ago, but left it idling on the hard drive, wondering if it needed work and/or could be made into a longer story. In the end, after a little editing, I decided to leave it mostly as it originally was, and just post it. For the SwanFire shippers that still believe in our ship - if you're still out there - this is for you :)**

 _ **Disclaimer: All recognisable characters belong to Eddy Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and other folks who aren't me.**_

Twist of Fate

Running had been his life for more years than he cared to remember. The boy they called Baelfire had not meant to end up in these situations, constantly looking over his shoulder, afraid of who was creeping up behind him. For the longest time there were enemies who too easily identified the Dark One's son as a target. After that, there was the cops to contend with as his crimes grew in number and he wondered if his luck could really hold forever. It was almost a year ago now that he realised as much as he had things to run from, he also had a future to run towards as well.

Neal Cassidy, as he thought of himself now, was a thief and a liar, by necessity in the beginning and more so by design now. He was the son of a man most thought was fictional, boyfriend and partner to the most amazing woman he had ever met, and very soon he would be father to a child.

It had never been the plan, not at all. Neal and Emma got as far as deciding they would fence the watches he stole in Seattle, change the VIN on their little yellow bug, and then drive. He thought Canada would be simpler, but she had her heart set on Tallahassee, so he made it happen. New identities actually weren't as hard to set up as you might think and with the cash they made and the contacts they both had, it wasn't long before the world met them anew. In the privacy of their own home, their real names were spoken, because these days Neal was who he had become.

Baelfire was not a name he ever told Emma, nor ever explained what he had been told by some guy who called himself August in a Portland back alley a year ago. She was from his world, it had to be destiny that they ended up together, when she dived into his stolen car to steal it all over again. In that moment their adventure had begun, and though he had started to think it would be impossible for him to find any kind of happily ever after in his long and twisted life, Neal knew he was getting it now, with Emma, with their baby.

"I still can't believe it," she said, smiling as she stood before the full-length mirror in their rented accommodation in Tallahassee. "We were always so careful..."

"Except for that one time," Neal recalled as he got up from the bed and came to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his hands atop hers on her pregnant belly. "In the hotel room, the night you decided this was going to be our new home," he reminded her. "You seduced me, Miss Swan," he said teasingly in her ear.

"Maybe, I did." She giggled, leaning back into his embrace. "But I'm not sorry. I know it's not ideal, throwing a baby into the mix just when we were getting stable, going straight, but it can be okay, right?" she said, turning around in his arms.

"Emma, it's fine," he promised. "It's better than fine. I told you, it's fantastic!" he declared with a grin. "It was always going to be you and me, and we had to give up the street-life some day, now is as good a time as any. Now we have the best reason in the world."

She loved that he was so happy about this. Emma knew Neal loved her just as much as she loved him, but her being pregnant had come as such a shock and she hadn't been entirely sure how Neal would react. She saw it happen to others she knew, friends and fellow foster kids. Get pregnant and the man will leave you just as sure as the sun rises. Neal seemed more determined to stick with her now than ever before, and that was really saying something. It helped Emma not to feel so scared about becoming a mother, something she had never really planned to do, and yet was so excited about now.

"I want to be the best mom," she said definitely. "It's not going to be easy, I don't exactly have much in the way of a frame of reference, but I wanna try. This kid deserves the best."

"And this kid will get it," Neal promised her. "I know what it is to be without parents, you know I do. This baby is never going to be alone, we're gonna see to that. He or she is going to be the most loved kid in the entire world."

Emma had tears sparkling in her eyes as she leaned in to kiss his lips. Neal was so amazing, just everything she could ever want in a man, and when he promised everything was going to be okay, she actually believed him. For a while, Emma thought that made her a fool. She never trusted anyone before, she didn't dare to, not since she was too little to even understand that a lot of people were all out for what they could get and would always screw you over if they could. To think that a guy she met by chance, a fellow thief on the streets of Portland could come to mean so much to her. It was an insane twist of fate, but she had never been happier than this in her entire life.

She gasped and pulled out of their kiss when a strange sensation passed through her. Neal looked alarmed at first but then only intrigued as Emma guided his hand to her stomach again and he felt the baby kicking in there. His son or daughter, the perfect blend of himself and Emma. Raising a baby on minimum wage and the little savings they had left from fencing the watches wasn't going to be easy, especially when they had to be mindful of the fact they were technically still on the run. Still, Neal had faith, and a love for Emma and their unborn child so strong it was unshakeable. Leaving her, as a stranger had once asked him to do for the sake of her supposed destiny to break a curse, it couldn't matter, it just wasn't an option. This was their destiny now, to be together, to raise a child and be happy. Neal believed that and doubted he would ever stop.

 _Ten Years Later_

Strange things had started happening ever since the book arrived. Time out of number Neal almost threw it out, and more often than that he took a deep breath to summon the courage and tell Emma the truth. Neither action ever came to pass, but day by day Neal knew that things were changing. On the day of Emma's twenty eighth birthday, he knew for sure that there was no choice but to give in to what all the signs were pointing towards.

Lying awake, he listened for her as she tucked their son into his bed and kissed him goodnight. A moment later she slipped in through the door, beautiful as she had ever been and smiling widely.

"I actually think he's more excited about my birthday than I am," she said as she joined her boyfriend in bed and kissed his lips.

It concerned Emma that he didn't look happy. Though he swore he still loved her and their son, proving it in every way it was possible to do so, Emma knew Neal was not half so happy now as he had been in the early days. He was pensive a lot, worried about things she couldn't understand, that he didn't seem to be able to explain. She had no idea she was about to find out why that was.

"Emma, we have to talk," he said in a whisper, watching her expression crumble at the sound of those words.

After all, were they not this world's signal between couples that the worst had happened or was about to? 'We need to talk' meant 'we need to break up' or 'I've done something that you're going to hate me for'. He didn't want either of those translations to be true right now, and yet they might just be.

"Neal, if you're leaving..." she said straight away, at which he shook his head.

"Emma, I would never do that," he swore, his hand cupping her cheek, eyes holding her gaze. "I promised you ten years ago that my love for you was true, that I was never going anywhere and I meant that. I still mean that."

"Good." She smiled but it didn't make her eyes somehow. "I love you too, you know that, so why so serious?" she asked, scared to death of what he was going to tell her.

"Tomorrow is your twenty eighth birthday," he reminded her pointlessly, "and that's quite a milestone."

"Says the guy that's almost seven years older than me!" she said, laughing at him, and yet his expression remained stony.

"A little more than that actually," he muttered, pulling himself up against the headboard. "Emma, you know how honest I've been with you. Okay, I told you about my criminal past, I never hid any of that, not from you."

"I know." She nodded, that feeling of cold dread returning to her heart. "I'm honest with you too, you know that. More honest than I've ever been with anyone my whole life."

"But there are things I haven't told you, and not just about myself," he admitted then. "Some of it is about you too."

He reached down from his side of the bed to the floor and produced a book from under the edge. Emma immediately recognised it as 'Once Upon A Time', her son's book of fairytales that had shown up one day with a simple note saying it was a gift for the new arrival. It was a little dog-eared and tattered after almost ten years of being read and looked at over and over, but it was still a prized possession.

"These stories," said Neal, flipping the pages. "The tale of Snow White and Prince Charming who sent their baby through a wardrobe to the land without magic..."

"What? Are you going to tell me now that the Emma in the book is me?" she smirked, back to amused in a second until she realised how serious Neal still looked. "Yeah, you're hilarious," she said, turning to get out of bed. "I don't need this after a long day."

"You got mad any time that joke was made by anyone," he said, grabbing at her arm. "Emma did you ever stop to consider you reacted that way for a reason? Because on some level you know it's true?"

She stopped in her tracks at that question. Neal's fingers had a real grip on her upper arm, but he wasn't hurting her, just holding her in place. She didn't feel the need to run from him, she never had, but what he was saying, thoughts she had herself sometimes, and dreams that backed them up, all of that she wanted to run from. She had been abandoned by her parents and no trace of them was ever found. It would explain that and so many other things, strange coincidences and abilities she seemed to have. If magic were real, it wouldn't really be so crazy. It would make more sense than not right now, she just didn't want to believe it, it was too strange.

"How would you know?" she asked, without turning around. "If it were true, and I'm not saying it is, but if it was, why would you know and I wouldn't?"

"Because," said Neal softly, "I'm from the same place you are."

Emma turned around slowly, eyes wide as saucers as she observed him. The revelation that she might be the princess in the story book, that she could almost accept with so much evidence laid out before her, but Neal, her partner, her lover, the father of her child, he couldn't have known all this time, surely. He couldn't have lied and kept all this from her.

"No." She shook her head, pulled far enough away that he couldn't reach her anymore. "You're not serious, you're not-"

"Emma..." He leaned over to reach for her but she got clean up off the bed at that point.

"Neal, for God's sake, if this is a joke-"

"It's not a joke," he promised her. "I wish it were, but it's not. I swear to you, when we met I had no idea you were from there," he assured her, as honest and loving as he had ever looked, though Emma was barely taking notice.

She paced the bedroom floor, running her hands back through her long blonde hair, trying to unscramble a hundred crazy thoughts and emotions than ran through her mind and body. This was insane, utterly insane, and yet she couldn't find a way to deny it or make it go away.

"That day we planned to fence the watches," Neal continued on. "I met this guy, he knew who I was and he told me who you were. He said you had a destiny to be a saviour, that there was a curse you were supposed to break when you turned twenty eight. I didn't want to believe him, and even though I knew he must be telling the truth, I was selfish, Emma, weak and selfish. I didn't want to give you up, and then our kid came along and... and I didn't know what to do."

"How about talking to me? Would that have been a plan?" she asked too loudly, immediately moderating her tone when she heard her son stir in the next room. "Neal, it's been ten years, ten whole years and all this time... My God, is there anything else you've been keeping from me? I mean, is Neal even your name?"

She was so lost in a million questions and the swimming of her head, and honestly, he didn't feel much better. He wanted her to know everything, at least as much as he was able to tell, but Neal's heart was breaking as much as Emma's own at the sight of her pain and tears.

"Neal is who I am now," he promised her as she sank down onto the edge of the bed, close enough for him to crawl to, though he dare not touch her still. "Neal is the man you fell in love with, the father of our son, the only person I want to be," he swore to her. "But when I was born it was in a different time and a different world. My name was Baelfire."

Emma looked thoughtful a while as she turned to look at him. Tears streamed from her eyes as she reached out her hand to his face. Her Neal. He still looked the same, and she did believe what he was saying, as crazy as it sounded. He wouldn't lie, not about something so serious, and she would know if he had gone crazy. No, he was perfectly serious and on some level she wasn't even as shocked as she ought to be.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to say, not to any of this," she said, shaking her head and swallowing hard. "You're telling me our lives are just lies."

"No, Emma," he promised her, his hand covering hers at his face. "Our lives, this life we built together, that's all real, the most real thing I have ever known," he told her definitely, eyes looking directly into her own as their foreheads touched. "What I'm telling you is about our pasts, and I'm giving you a choice about your future."

" _Our_ future," she corrected immediately. "What we do, we do together, just like always."

"Agreed," he promised her with a gentle smile. "But I'm not a saviour, Emma, that's gotta be you. You know as well as I do, there is something special inside of you, something that you need to do. All I can do to help is tell you where to find your destiny."

She considered what he was telling her for all of ten seconds, then nodded her head.

"Okay. Tell me."

 _Two Years Later_

"Now blow out the candles and make a wish!"

Emma smiled and she did as instructed, yet she had trouble with the wish making part. Sat in the booth of Granny's Diner, she leaned happily into her boyfriend's embrace, their son squeezed up against her other side. Across the table sat her parents and so many new friends that she had made here in Storybrooke. It was nothing like Tallahassee where she thought her future would always be, and yet it had so quickly become a home.

Fairytales and magic were real. The surprise of it all had not actually been as shocking as she expected, and coming here to break a curse had been oddly easy to do. It had taken a while to straighten out the rest of the problems that existed here, fighting dragons, evil queens, and the like. Then there was connecting with parents that had given her away and looked the same age as her, plus finding out Neal's father was the former evil imp, Rumpelstiltskin. Theirs was one twisted family tree, no doubt, and yet it was still a family, something Emma never did expect to have, not like this.

"You make your wish?" asked Neal, kissing her lips.

"I can't think of a single thing to wish for," she told him honestly. "I have everything I need right here to live happily ever after."

The End


End file.
